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The Media Is Focusing On the WRONG Senate Torture Report
The Big Story Torture Everyone Is Missing
While the torture report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee is very important, it doesn’t address the big scoop regarding torture.
Instead, it is the Senate Armed Services Committee’s report that dropped the big bombshell regarding the U.S. torture program.
Senator Levin, commenting on a Armed Services Committee’s report on torture in 2009, explained:
The techniques are based on tactics used by Chinese Communists against American soldiers during the Korean War for the purpose of eliciting FALSE confessions for propaganda purposes. Techniques used in SERE training include stripping trainees of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, subjecting them to face and body slaps, depriving them of sleep, throwing them up against a wall, confining them in a small box, treating them like animals, subjecting them to loud music and flashing lights, and exposing them to extreme temperatures [and] waterboarding.
McClatchy filled in important details:
Former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration…
For most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.”
It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document…
When people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder,” he continued.” Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam . . .
A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under “pressure” to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.
“While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq,” Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. “The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”
“I think it’s obvious that the administration was scrambling then to try to find a connection, a link (between al Qaida and Iraq),” [Senator] Levin said in a conference call with reporters. “They made out links where they didn’t exist.”
Levin recalled Cheney’s assertions that a senior Iraqi intelligence officer had met Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, in the Czech Republic capital of Prague just months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The FBI and CIA found that no such meeting occurred.
The Washington Post reported the same year:
Despite what you’ve seen on TV, torture is really only good at one thing: eliciting false confessions. Indeed, Bush-era torture techniques, we now know, were cold-bloodedly modeled after methods used by Chinese Communists to extract confessions from captured U.S. servicemen that they could then use for propaganda during the Korean War.
So as shocking as the latest revelation in a new Senate Armed Services Committee report may be, it actually makes sense — in a nauseating way. The White House started pushing the use of torture not when faced with a “ticking time bomb” scenario from terrorists, but when officials in 2002 were desperately casting about for ways to tie Iraq to the 9/11 attacks — in order to strengthen their public case for invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 at all.
***
Gordon Trowbridge writes for the Detroit News: “Senior Bush administration officials pushed for the use of abusive interrogations of terrorism detainees in part to seek evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq, according to newly declassified information discovered in a congressional probe.
Colin Powell's former chief of staff (Colonel Larry Wilkerson) wrote in 2009 that the Bush administration's "principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qaeda."
Indeed, one of the two senior instructors from the Air Force team which taught U.S. servicemen how to resist torture by foreign governments when used to extract false confessions has blown the whistle on the true purpose behind the U.S. torture program.
As Truthout reported:
[Torture architect] Jessen’s notes were provided to Truthout by retired Air Force Capt. Michael Kearns, a “master” SERE instructor and decorated veteran who has previously held high-ranking positions within the Air Force Headquarters Staff and Department of Defense (DoD).
***
The Jessen notes clearly state the totality of what was being reverse-engineered – not just ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ but an entire program of exploitation of prisoners using torture as a central pillar,” he said. “What I think is important to note, as an ex-SERE Resistance to Interrogation instructor, is the focus of Jessen’s instruction. It is EXPLOITATION, not specifically interrogation. And this is not a picayune issue, because if one were to ‘reverse-engineer’ a course on resistance to exploitation then what one would get is a plan to exploit prisoners, not interrogate them. The CIA/DoD torture program appears to have the same goals as the terrorist organizations or enemy governments for which SV-91 and other SERE courses were created to defend against: the full exploitation of the prisoner in his intelligence, propaganda, or other needs held by the detaining power, such as the recruitment of informers and double agents. Those aspects of the US detainee program have not generally been discussed as part of the torture story in the American press.”
In a subsequent report, Truthout notes:
Air Force Col. Steven Kleinman, a career military intelligence officer recognized as one of the DOD’s most effective interrogators as well a former SERE instructor and director of intelligence for JPRA’s teaching academy, said …. “This is the guidebook to getting false confessions, a system drawn specifically from the communist interrogation model that was used to generate propaganda rather than intelligence” …. “If your goal is to obtain useful and reliable information this is not the source book you should be using.”
Interrogators also forced detainees to take drugs … which further impaired their ability to tell the truth.
And one of the two main architects of the torture program admitted this week on camera:
You can get people to say anything to stop harsh interrogations if you apply them in a way that does that.
And false confessions were, in fact, extracted.
For example:
- A humanitarian aid worker said: torture only stopped when I pretended I was in Al Qaeda
- Under torture, Libyan Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi falsely claimed there was a link between Saddam Hussein, al-Qaida and WMD
- President Bush mentioned Abu Zubaydah as a success story, where torture saved lives. Zubaydah was suspected of being a high-ranking al-Qaida leader. Bush administration officials claimed Zubaydah told them that al-Qaida had links with Saddam Hussein. He also claimed there was a plot to attack Washington with a “dirty bomb”. Both claims are now recognized to be false, even by the CIA, which also admits he was never a member of al-Qaida.
- One of the Main Sources for the 9/11 Commission Report was Tortured Until He Agreed to Sign a Confession that He Was NOT EVEN ALLOWED TO READ
- The so-called 9/11 mastermind said: “During … my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear” (the self-confessed 9/11 “mastermind” falsely confessed to crimes he didn’t commit)
And the 9/11 Commission Report was largely based on a third-hand account of what tortured detainees said, with two of the three parties in the communication being government employees. And the government went to great lengths to obstruct justice and hide unflattering facts from the Commission.
According to NBC News:
- Much of the 9/11 Commission Report was based upon the testimony of people who were tortured
- At least four of the people whose interrogation figured in the 9/11 Commission Report have claimed that they told interrogators information as a way to stop being “tortured.”
- The 9/11 Commission itself doubted the accuracy of the torture confessions, and yet kept their doubts to themselves
Details here.
Today, Raymond McGovern – a 27-year CIA veteran, who chaired National Intelligence Estimates and personally delivered intelligence briefings to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, their Vice Presidents, Secretaries of State, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many other senior government officials – provides details about one torture victim (Al-Libi) at former Newsweek and AP reporter Robert Parry's website:
But if it’s bad intelligence you’re after, torture works like a charm. If, for example, you wish to “prove,” post 9/11, that “evil dictator” Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda and might arm the terrorists with WMD, bring on the torturers.
It is a highly cynical and extremely sad story, but many Bush administration policymakers wanted to invade Iraq before 9/11 and thus were determined to connect Saddam Hussein to those attacks. The PR push began in September 2002 – or as Bush’s chief of staff Andrew Card put it, “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”
By March 2003 – after months of relentless “marketing” – almost 70 percent of Americans had been persuaded that Saddam Hussein was involved in some way with the attacks of 9/11.
The case of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, a low-level al-Qaeda operative, is illustrative of how this process worked. Born in Libya in 1963, al-Libi ran an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan from 1995 to 2000. He was detained in Pakistan on Nov. 11, 2001, and then sent to a U.S. detention facility in Kandahar, Afghanistan. He was deemed a prize catch, since it was thought he would know of any Iraqi training of al-Qaeda.
The CIA successfully fought off the FBI for first rights to interrogate al-Libi. FBI’s Dan Coleman, who “lost” al-Libi to the CIA (at whose orders, I wonder?), said, “Administration officials were always pushing us to come up with links” between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
CIA interrogators elicited some “cooperation” from al-Libi through a combination of rough treatment and threats that he would be turned over to Egyptian intelligence with even greater experience in the torture business.
By June 2002, al-Libi had told the CIA that Iraq had “provided” unspecified chemical and biological weapons training for two al-Qaeda operatives, an allegation that soon found its way into other U.S. intelligence reports. Al-Libi’s treatment improved as he expanded on his tales about collaboration between al-Qaeda and Iraq, adding that three al-Qaeda operatives had gone to Iraq “to learn about nuclear weapons.”
Al-Libi’s claim was well received at the White House even though the Defense Intelligence Agency was suspicious.
“He lacks specific details” about the supposed training, the DIA observed. “It is possible he does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers. Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest.”
Meanwhile, at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, Maj. Paul Burney, a psychiatrist sent there in summer 2002, told the Senate, “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq and we were not successful. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link … there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”
***
President Bush relied on al-Libi’s false Iraq allegation for a major speech in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002, just a few days before Congress voted on the Iraq War resolution. Bush declared, “We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases.”
And Colin Powell relied on it for his famous speech to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, declaring: “I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these [chemical and biological] weapons to al-Qaeda. Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story.”
Al-Libi’s “evidence” helped Powell as he sought support for what he ended up calling a “sinister nexus” between Iraq and al-Qaeda, in the general effort to justify invading Iraq.
For a while, al-Libi was practically the poster boy for the success of the Cheney/Bush torture regime; that is, until he publicly recanted and explained that he only told his interrogators what he thought would stop the torture.
You see, despite his cooperation, al-Libi was still shipped to Egypt where he underwent more abuse, according to a declassified CIA cable from early 2004 when al-Libi recanted his earlier statements. The cable reported that al-Libi said Egyptian interrogators wanted information about al-Qaeda’s connections with Iraq, a subject “about which [al-Libi] said he knew nothing and had difficulty even coming up with a story.”
According to the CIA cable, al-Libi said his interrogators did not like his responses and “placed him in a small box” for about 17 hours. After he was let out of the box, al-Libi was given a last chance to “tell the truth.” When his answers still did not satisfy, al-Libi says he “was knocked over with an arm thrust across his chest and fell on his back” and then was “punched for 15 minutes.”
After Al-Libi recanted, the CIA recalled all intelligence reports based on his statements, a fact recorded in a footnote to the report issued by the 9/11 Commission. By then, however, the Bush administration had gotten its way regarding the invasion of Iraq and the disastrous U.S. occupation was well underway.
***
Intensive investigations into these allegations – after the U.S. military had conquered Iraq – failed to turn up any credible evidence to corroborate these allegations. What we do know is that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were bitter enemies, with al-Qaeda considering the secular Hussein an apostate to Islam.
Al-Libi, who ended up in prison in Libya, reportedly committed suicide shortly after he was discovered there by a human rights organization. Thus, the world never got to hear his own account of the torture that he experienced and the story that he presented and then recanted.
Hafed al-Ghwell, a Libyan-American and a prominent critic of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime at the time of al-Libi’s death, explained to Newsweek, “This idea of committing suicide in your prison cell is an old story in Libya.”
Paul Krugman [whatever you think of his economics, he got this one right] eloquently summarized the truth about the torture used:
Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.
There’s a word for this: it’s evil.
Torture Program Was Part of a Con Job
As discussed above, in order to “justify” the Iraq war, top Bush administration officials pushed and insisted that interrogators use special torture methods aimed at extracting false confessions to attempt to create a false linkage between between Al Qaida and Iraq. And see this and this.
But this effort started earlier …
5 hours after the 9/11 attacks, Donald Rumsfeld said “my interest is to hit Saddam”.
He also said “Go massive . . . Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”
And at 2:40 p.m. on September 11th, in a memorandum of discussions between top administration officials, several lines below the statement “judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [that is, Saddam Hussein] at same time”, is the statement “Hard to get a good case.” In other words, top officials knew that there wasn’t a good case that Hussein was behind 9/11, but they wanted to use the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to justify war with Iraq anyway.
Moreover, “Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the [9/11] attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda”.
And a Defense Intelligence Terrorism Summary issued in February 2002 by the United States Defense Intelligence Agency cast significant doubt on the possibility of a Saddam Hussein-al-Qaeda conspiracy.
And yet Bush, Cheney and other top administration officials claimed repeatedly for years that Saddam was behind 9/11. See this analysis. Indeed, Bush administration officials apparently swore in a lawsuit that Saddam was behind 9/11.
Moreover, President Bush’s March 18, 2003 letter to Congress authorizing the use of force against Iraq, includes the following paragraph:
(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.
Therefore, the Bush administration expressly justified the Iraq war to Congress by representing that Iraq planned, authorized, committed, or aided the 9/11 attacks.
Indeed, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind reports that the White House ordered the CIA to forge and backdate a document falsely linking Iraq with Muslim terrorists and 9/11 … and that the CIA complied with those instructions and in fact created the forgery, which was then used to justify war against Iraq. And see this.
Suskind also revealed that “Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official ‘that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.’ ”
Cheney made the false linkage between Iraq and 9/11 on many occasions.
For example, according to Raw Story, Cheney was still alleging a connection between Iraq and the alleged lead 9/11 hijacker in September 2003 – a year after it had been widely debunked. When NBC’s Tim Russert asked him about a poll showing that 69% of Americans believed Saddam Hussein had been involved in 9/11, Cheney replied:
It’s not surprising that people make that connection.
And even after the 9/11 Commission debunked any connection, Cheney said that the evidence is “overwhelming” that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein’s regime , that Cheney “probably” had information unavailable to the Commission, and that the media was not ‘doing their homework’ in reporting such ties.
Again, the Bush administration expressly justified the Iraq war by representing that Iraq planned, authorized, committed, or aided the 9/11 attacks. See this, this, this.
Even then-CIA director George Tenet said that the White House wanted to invade Iraq long before 9/11, and inserted “crap” in its justifications for invading Iraq.
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill – who sat on the National Security Council – also says that Bush planned the Iraq war before 9/11.
Top British officials say that the U.S. discussed Iraq regime change even before Bush took office.
And in 2000, Cheney said a Bush administration might “have to take military action to forcibly remove Saddam from power.” And see this.
The administration’s false claims about Saddam and 9/11 helped convince a large portion of the American public to support the invasion of Iraq. While the focus now may be on false WMD claims, it is important to remember that, at the time, the alleged link between Iraq and 9/11 was at least as important in many people’s mind as a reason to invade Iraq.
So the torture program was really all about “justifying” the ultimate war crime: launching an unnecessary war of aggression based upon false pretenses.
Postscript: It is beyond any real dispute that torture does not work to produce any useful, truthful intelligence. Today, the following question made it to the front page of Reddit:
Why would the CIA torture if torture “doesn’t work”? Wouldn’t they want the most effective tool to gather intelligence?
The Senate Armed Services Committee report gave the answer.
»
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good points and this.
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Two Docs Got $80 Million to Develop Torture Tactics
" The United States government paid two military psychologists $80 million to develop torture tactics that were used against suspected terrorists in the wake of the September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.
In 2002, two former Air Force psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, became the masterminds of the CIA’s torture program, according to a new report released by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The two men, identified in the report under the pseudonyms Grayson Swigert and Hammond Dunbar, devised and performed torture tactics--including waterboarding and mock burial on some of the CIA’s most significant detainees." ..
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http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/two-docs-got-dollar80-million-to-...
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comment: ........this would be hilarious if it were not for the infinite stupidity
and corruption of decency it signifies, exemplifies and embodies. ie cia
unloosing the kraken .....
Illuminating.
I'd say that they all should be tortured as a punishment, but then I have a soul.
So just taking out the trash with a guillotine will have to suffice.
An American, not US subject.
The "Big Lie" isn't that Iraq had nothing to do with 911, it's that 911 fulfilled the "Pearl Harbor Event" required by the PNAC plan (which is now U.S. foreign policy). Exactly how 911 went down isn't important, but the realization of the fact that our government had a lot to do with 911 is fairly obvious. All the rest (torture) only demonstrates how far these MFers will go to accomplish their goals. And that means murdering you, me, and our kin.
It was not ONLY the CIA:
Remember also how much hate FRANCE got in the US for trying to prevent this dirty and stupid Irak war in 2003.
The whole dumbass "FREEDOM FRIES", the TV news showing proud Americans pouring French wines in the gutter, the “cheese-eating surrender MONKEYS” things – all kind of silly jokes still continuing, even in ZH …. Five years of Anti-French slander and vilification was thus thrust by the White House, the Administration, members of Congress, governors and by lackeys in the media (like Fox News or Murdoch Press).
May all Americans remember what they did, and how it speaks volumes about how are treated dissent, opinion and opposition - especially from old allied countries.
The French are worthy of derision with or without the issue of Iraq.
too true. mostly emanating from FAUX News. Broke more flat screens every time Hannity's face appeared
from my favorite economist:
Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too
our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale.
Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins
to wonder whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid.
- Soren Kierkegaard
Take up arms or take it in the ass.....
9/11 and the Cheney Conspiracy with Michael Ruppert (pt.2/2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kW5qiuLb8jY
Thanks Blindman. Your vision is 20/20 when you suggest a clip from the late great Mr. Ruppert.
@"HELLO ... MAINSTREAM MEDIA ... ANYONE HOME?" g.w.
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as mr. ruppert pointed out, paraphrase ..
" they are not the fourth estate, there is only one
estate with different departments." m.r.(rip)
.
but, the cynicism of fascism is no better than
the enthusiasm of national socialism. there, a collective
rock and hard place when it comes to political discourse.
of corpurse, there
be a better, other way, untried.
Study Suggests Conspiracy Theorists Are More Positive & ‘Sane’ Compared To Conventional Thinkers
December 8, 2014 by Alanna Ketler.
http://www.collective-evolution.com/2014/12/08/study-suggests-conspiracy...
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9/11 Meet The Press With Dick Cheney NBC September 16, 2001 10:45am - 11:00am
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQBsCIaxMuM
Nothing new really.
After OKC bombing they wanted to pass the patriot act but they waited till after the '94 elections where a bunch of constitution supporting representatives (to start their terms at least) got elected and they couldn't get the full thing through. Passed a watered down omnibus crime bill instead.
People weren't only tortured, but were killed in that process.
The DICK Cheney didn't really start all this crap, but kind of mastered it I guess with the help of all the neo-cons.
This is a logical extension of "Operation Paperclip"- the only thing missing are the eyepatches.
Yes G.W.
Nothing at all unfamiliar in the "report" that we didn't already know. What I loved best this week is when the thieves started their finger pointing a.k.a. The "Dick" Cheney when he deflected all the abuse charges levied at him by the media by simply saying what he has always said... G.W. was the President who knew everything and authorized it!
The one very important thread and constant that has been weaved through all of the Government testimony given most recently with regard to the "torture report" again after the fact is that the event(s) of 9/11 are the reason(s) that make torture acceptable and that whatever treaty conventions that were applicable prior to those events it is necessary because this battle is against the worst and most vicious enemy that the U.S. and the World has ever encountered.
Why hasn't anyone built a story around the significance of what NYCCAN attempted to do for the second time in 5 years and failed even though they had the number of signatures required just as they did the first time they attempted it in 2009?...
Why won't Anderson Cooper CNN, Larry King RT and Rachel Maddow not bring up such an important happening that represents such significant importance to every American so that it will never happen again being silenced -again?!!!
related: cia pushback reveals more bush/cheney pushing for false intelligence re:atta iraq connection-
http://www.levin.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/levin-releases-new-in...
we flogged some goyim
Machiavellian to a T : torture until you admit to the BIG LIE.
What the Inquisition taught the world. Its older than Korea...
Once the big lie is in place, torture has served its purpose à posteriori : to have justified what history disproved (aka no WMD in IRaq) : that al Qaeda and Saddam were worlds apart.
Whereas Huntingtonian Clash of Civilization LOGIC (the Neo-con Bible) required for the opposite to be REVEALED so that the BIG LIE could become BIG TRUTH. And 9/11 the making of an evil Saddam-Al Qaeda collusion.
The BIG LIE is what made the Crusades "God Wills IT"; Papal conspiracy mantra; into divine truth and its reversal on battlefield required that the Inquistion rub out all those at home who questioned the Soldier-Monk Mantra; to defend that original lie by taking out the true christians decrying the Papal church and asking for Reform, like the Occitan Cathars etc. etc.
The big lie is what keeps those in power to stay in power and preserve their status in History !
Bush Cheney were just copying the Crusader meme once again, including the BIG LIE when it failed.
Just like Winston Smith after he's arrested in Orwell's 1984. Tortured until you admit whatever they want to hear & then it stops. The "truth" has nothing to do with it, they just want the admission from the prisoner to further an agenda, in the same in GITMO as in 1984, admit you're a "terrorist" & validate the party's agenda.
If the Party says 2 + 2 = 5, then it does. What's true and what's false is determined by the Party.
The Commie Czechs did it to a guy called Artur London, a guy who fought in the International brigades in Spain, in real life (1952); and Kafka immortalised it in the Trial.
The Trial was written during World War I. But I agree with you that the theme is timeless and perhaps a peek into our futures.
apparently the only ones who didn't know that a whole lot of illegal things were going on were the Obama people who never expressed the slightest interest in any of this. i assume a lot of money was paid to him, or some other consideration, or he is a truly duplicitious person
one of the first things that political whore said when he got into office was something about" looking forward" and not back.
Funny thing, thet phrase was resurrected more than once in this latest DC show
Why would he want to do anything to jeopardize getting his hands on such a powerful and compliant tool such as the CIA?
Martin Luther King Jr. - "I have a dream..." Dick Cheney - "I have a dream..." I don't think they will be erecting statues of Dickie any time soon...
WTF, Dick Cheney has a carbeurator for a heart. I somehow think that is fitting.
P.S. Regarding the Iraq War, none other than Rachel Maddow did a special show about it, reporting how, at those Cheney Energy Meetings that began right after Bush was installed in the White House in 2001, maps of Iraq were studied in great detail, and its oil resources divided up. (At least, that's what I got out of that special show.)
I wrote about it here:
You may have heard that the Energy Task Force chaired by Dick Cheney prior to 9/11 collected maps of Iraqi oil, Saudi and United Arab Emerates fields and potential suitors for that oil. And you might have heard that the oil bigs attended the Task Force meetings.
But you probably haven’t heard that – according to the New Yorker – a secret document written by the National Security Council (NSC) on February 3, 2001 directed NSC staff to cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered
the “melding” of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy:
It is difficult to brush off Cheney’s Energy Task Force’s examination
of arab oil maps as a harmless comparison of American energy policy
with known oil reserves because the NSC explicitly linked the Task Force, oil, and regime change.
But don’t believe me…
The above-linked New Yorker article quotes a former senior director
for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian affairs at the NSC said:
See also this essay.
and its not just any oil patch, its some of the last sweet, easy crude
the irony (read our hubris) is that it turned out to be anything but "cheap"
just another empire killing itself trying to maintain armies all over
Superb essay link GW; showing how empire politics had as nexus the "golden oil patch" strategy as its TRUE focus.
The rest is all ideological wrapping to keep that ONE truth of Empire focus from appearing as its true aim.
Just like the Crusades made Jerusalem the symbol and liberating it their mission statement; GWB made Saddam into the Bogeyman (Just as Reagan had made the Ayatollahs and Afghan invasion by the Ruskis as his bogeymen); all to achieve the Conquest of New Byzantium : the Oil patch. This comes out very clearly in that essay (the twin Afghan-Iraq threads).
History rhymes. Alike the Frankish invasion of Middle Ages. The true aim of the Crusaders was not Jerusalem but Byzantium. Thats why they went there, to access the Silk and spice routes and also to conquer the Symbol by encroaching on a decadent Abbasid Empire all divided in local wafare (Seljuk Kurds, Fatimids, Abbasids-- hovering around disunited Baghdad, Cairo and Damascus).
They achieved it in 1204 and then...thieves fell out (hubris is a bitch)! And they (the Papal/Frankish combine of that age) lost it ALL : Crusades, Holy Land, Byzantium reverted to the Greeks (but fatally wounded thus easily conquered by the Ottomans) and even Sicily and Apulia awarded by Popes to the Franks were lost to the rival Aragonite clan (France's great Italian debacle). All that heralded the Reform...
We are not there in today's world...but the thieves falling out is visible.
GW, of course you were way ahead. I was just amazed that a MSM show, Rachel's, had the guts to report on it.
And we breathe polluted air, for our Masters. And now they have ruined the water supply.
GW, thank you again.
Dude who cares what report they are reading from, it is a well known fact the security/espionage Agencies use these tactics no matter what (don't be naive if you think anything will changre that lol)
For me because it was released because they were trying to divert you from something else
well now i know what it was : the budget they passed late last night had a 1700 pages that no one understands to help the banks with their exposure to bad/toxic derivatives
so fuck the correct report or the MSM
The spying bill which passed - like all of the other spying bills - would NOT HAVE passed if communist torture techniques were not used to whip up terror fears of boogeymen.
Which explains why it was Sen. Fineswine that let it out!
Good work.
Thanks for your work GW.
You have hit the nail on the head again. The issue is not torture, because very few in Congress give a shit about it. The issue is assessing blame for foreign policy failure and maintaining Control over the Sheep.
So Sen Di Fi wants to debate tactics, not strategy. Fine. They are all in favor of a Police/Surveillance State and they're all in favor of a massive Government and Crony Capitalism. These are the Strategies.
Tactics are just the nuances of Droning versus Torture versus Covert Overthrow of unfriendly regimes etc. And blaming the CIA for foreign policy failure is a bi-partisan tradition going back to the Cold War. We went through all this bullshit with the Church Commission after Vietnam, for example.
The Establishment throws expendable people under the bus so the Sheep don't wake up.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Look at our Torture Report, not at the bill we are passing which allows the NSA to increase its spying on you, and which allows the Too Big To Fail banks' to recommence some of the derivatives-gambling that brought America to its knees in 2008.
SD,
Yes the spending bill is:
The Empire Strikes Back
But that doesn't mean that torture isn't important.
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two
opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to
function."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
did F. Scott say that when he was drunk or sober?
He plagiarized it from Eastern philosophy
Not really, western dialectics encourage that we entertain both sides of the argument before making our choices.
That is very Socratic. His rhetoric displayed it time and again as related by Plato.
An example of F. Scot's thesis : "Live like an Epicurean but die like a Stoic" is in line with that philosophy, as Socrates epitomised it in his life.
He loved to be with young people and indulged their aesthetic epicurien senses, like his own, during his existence.
But then drank the hemlock when his views were condemned by his fellow Athenians. One philosophy blended with the other by his very acts at different moments of his life. He was no Sophist.
There is enough literature on the use of torture on detainees in academic, historical, non-fiction and fiction domains to give the definitive answer to the question as to whether torture works. The answer of course is, it does not. If it worked, then statements under torture would long have been admissable as evidence in court. Mere common sense would tell anyone of marginal intelligence that people will always say anything the torturer wants to hear to avoid being tortured. That is the reason why nobody sane will torture a suspect if they want good intel because the best information is always gathered from willing participants. In the old days of the cold and hot wars, spooks were highly adept at turning the enemy to their side and it seems a shame that we seem to have lost that requisite art of dealing with human beings to gather actionable intelligence. But then again, as GW so lucidly presented, getting actionable intel was never the purpose of the US government of torturers - all they wanted was confirmation of their entirely false and evil narratives.
That is the thing. Even if you were subhuman enough to ignore the moral and legal implications of torturing someone beyond the point of insanity, even to death, why would you use a technique that is proven to elicit false information? Information that could not possibly ever be used to prosecute anyone? Information which, by the CIA's own admission did nothing to prevent terror attacks?
Maybe it's too neat, but if you take it for granted that Al-Queda is a product of western intelligence, then everything that has happened since 9/11 - all the oppressive laws, all the wars, all the lies, all the thieving, and all the laughably transparent propaganda - they start to make sense, in that it benefitted the MIC and the financiers and continues to do so today.
This isn't retrospective or out of context. I felt exactly the same about this more than a decade ago. The overwhelming disgust I feel for an organization that would make it a national policy to use torture - systematic, cold blooded, clinical torture not seen since the Baltic Waffen SS roamed europe - is beyond my vocabulary to express. There is nothing more darker, dangerous, backward and pitiful than a man without a conscience. When this deficiency is extrapolated to a national level, its leaders able to publicly elevate kidnapping, torture and murder with plaintive cries about necessity and the courage of its torturers, then I'm afraid that nation is beyond any hope of repentence until all those responsible are punished for their crimes against humanity.
it's hard to believe the same guys who designed 911 would do this....
The very reason they had this dog and pony show was to bury the real crime
my favorite tidbit by far was the 83 million paid to two psychologists.
Who said the Warlords are thoe only ones with cash palates
"things related and not"
Oh Donny Osmond Rumsfeld, you sure have a way with words
We are going to rue the day that we allowed this to happen.
While I agree there will be blowback from this, how exactly did "we" allow this to happen? If you think John and Mary Q Public are in control of their government, you are seriously deluded.
If you have the vote, say as a co-executor of a trust for example, you are responsible for the wellbeing of the benificiaries of that trust. Like wise the John and Mary Q Public are culpable for misfeasance, nonfeaasance and malficence.
I used to think that because I didn't vote or that I voted contrary to the result or because I supported Ron Paul in 2008 and 2012 with money and my vote that I shouldn't share the blame-- I've grown to realize that because I'm a part of the whole I'm responsible for the actions of the whole--
John and Mary Q Public are responsible and therefore are morally required to "fix it".
The fix will be tough but it is the only way--
First arrest and put on public trial before the world all entities public or private involved in "the crimes" of false war. This must also include "corporate persons".
Secondly to assume the cost of reparations to all victims of the false wars.
While the first is possible the second is not because the cost is too great and can never be repaid---so instead I will try make a world through my kids where this never happens again--I have no choice because I'm guilty--
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You became part of the whole (the body politic) when you registered to vote, indicating your participation in and consent to statutory law. So yes, when you vote you are assuming the guilt of the actions of the body politic.
I went a long time without voting. I registered Republican in 2008 so I could vote in the primaries for Ron Paul (which is required in California). I later realized what a waste of time and an unfortunate lapse in my judgment that was. I de-registered by writing a letter to the county registrar of voters telling them to remove me from the voter rolls and by doing so I have withdrawn myself from the body politic once again.
I am Chumbawamba.
Torture is NOT ABOUT GATHERING ANY INFORMATION...reliable or not.
Torture is employed as a method of demonstrating total State Control. That is why it is employed liberally in TOTALITARIAN REGIMES...including the United States...within our borders. It is used in the lockdown Mental Hospitals, at schools for AUTISTIC CHILDREN, at Jails, and in PRISONS.
Yes there are wiling psychopaths whom enjoy watching the suffering and agony of others.
The tragedy is that a majority of the American Public, not only financially supported torture...BUT MORALLY SUPPORTED IT AS WELL!!!
Human Beings are so fucked up and we have a NATION filled with psychopaths.
WE are going to get what we deserve, as the Germans and Japanese did following World War II.
I despise the Human Race. I despise being a Human Being.
My question of faith in God boils down to this...Just what is so redeemable about Humans? God needed to abandon us millennia ago.